"My Mario Kart reflexes aren’t what they used to be, but I am better at data science than I was as a fourth grader, so in this post I’ll use data to finally answer the question “Who is the best character in Mario Kart?”"

We’ll start by examining the stats of each character, kart, and tire independently using some fan-compiled data. One particular quirk of Mario Kart is that while there are a couple dozen characters, many of them have identical stats. From here on out, I’ll refer to the character (or kart, or tire) class by the name of one of its members. For example, in the heatmap below the row labelled ‘Peach’ also describes the stats for Daisy and Yoshi. The complete class memberships are listed at the end of the post in case you want to see where your favorite character lands.
There are seven classes of characters. Let’s have a look at how their stats compare.

Unless you’re going all-in on acceleration, it looks like a heavy character is the way to go; the two heaviest character classes (Wario and Donkey Kong) account for 11/15 of the Pareto-optimal configurations.

Wario/Sports Bike/Slick or Wario/Gold Standard/Slick get the top billing!

Mario Kart was a staple of my childhood — my friends and I would spend hours after school as Mario, Luigi, and other characters from the Nintendo universe racing around cartoonish tracks and lobbing pixelated bananas at each other.